Bloody Mary
by Roman Gaul
Summary: Shadowrun: A guerrilla unit of orks on the outskirts of San Francisco during the early occupation of General Saito oppressive regime. Part 1 of a series.


Bloody Mary

By: Graham Bonnington

We were proving our discipline as guerrillas by hiding in the dirt under Lupine shrubs for four days observing General Saito's forces marching back and forth across the Golden Gate Bridge. My squad consisted of Privates Rando, Draper, Muller, Harper and myself, Sergeant Nive. I was the only female. We reeked of ass in the shrubs on our stomachs facing the northern side of the Golden Gate in bushy camouflage.

Originally, we came here to place a surveillance drone in the air beyond Saito's perimeter sensors and hustle back to base, but our drone had been detected and shot down when it crossed the bay. A risk on bad intel that didn't pay off. We were compromised and we knew that if we tried to cross back through the perimeter to the north we would be detected by reinforced patrols trying to make sense of our activity. Four days had passed and Saito's northern flank remained unnervingly active.

We worked with what equipment we had in gathering intelligence to make our escape. Thermographic binoculars and rifle scopes, along with a scratchy shotgun mic we could use to monitor the northern entrance of the Golden Gate.

"Jap patrol said something bout forces being reassigned to the South. Something about a block-city block maybe? A fight in the city streets?" Private Muller whispered from his position next to me. He had been following a foot patrol with the shotgun mic ambling towards the bridge.

Private Muller was green, but had the discipline of a seasoned soldier. He was an ork like me, my entire squad was. Saito's reputation for slaughtering orks in Oakland galvanized many to sign up in the CFS Army to fight this war. Muller lost his sister and mother to Saito's forces. He kept his head in the game and didn't fog it up with dreams of vengeance. What made it worse was that he was kind of cute.

"Good. We'll try the north later tonight," I whispered and a relieved grunt echoed through my squad. We were all tired of chewing hard tac and soiling our trousers being still in the shrubs.

"Let's move now. They won't be scanning for us with everybody leaving," Private Draper said. His voice carried from the bushes. He hated recon and would rather fix half-tracks in a garage. "This waiting game is for pussies."

"Voice down Draper," I said. "My pussy loves waiting and we'll stay here until it says it's time."

"Aye Sarge," he whispered. "But Muller said your tight dark Latina pussy doesn't wait."

The unit chuckled, Muller blushed.

"Funny," I said. "The boys back on base say the same thing about your balls."

Draper snorted.

The Lupine shrubs exploded. A missile had shot down from the sky from a drone similar to the one we had tried to sneak in four days ago. I squirmed out from under bits of the shrub and turned to see Private Rando splattered into a bloody mess of flesh and guts lining the ork sized crater the missile had created.

"Head for the northern tree line. Hustle!" I ordered. The rest of my squad scrambled out and headed for the trees. Rando was right next to me and I didn't even take a scratch.

"Spotted the drone," Private Harper yelled out. He was a good runner and was the first to the trees.

"Shoot it down," I ordered as I took cover behind an oak.

My men destroyed it with tight and controlled bursts from their assault rifles and we kept moving. We had to make distance between us and Rando's corpse.

As we crested a small hill we ran right into a Saito patrol that opened fire on us before we could. Harper went down, along with Muller. If an ER squad stays behind to care for the wounded during a fire fight after everything goes FUBAR, then you're dead. There is no back up you can call. There are no reinforcements. Just you and the wilderness. At least that was what my commander had said. I didn't listen to him because I had Muller over my shoulders, carrying him like a tired lamb up the hill.

Draper kept the patrol off of us with steady covering fire as we skirted to the east, hoping to go around them and maybe move in on their flank if we saw an opening. Draper was making considerable distance from me.

I felt the sting from a bullet enter my leg and caught myself on a maple tree. Draper kept running.

"God-damnit!" I hit the dirt. Muller's limp body fell from my shoulders onto my back. Pushing myself out from under him, I checked Muller's face to see if I could knock some awake into him.

The Saito patrol was at least seventy meters to the left, so I had a few seconds to find a hole we could hide in. You have to keep your mind focused even if you know you're going to lose the battle, there is still a war that has to be won. It's not over until you're dust. If you're KIA then you should of rigged your body with explosives.

"Don't worry," Muller hefted a frag grenade. "I got the assholes Sarge, I ain't going anywhere." Muller lifted his other hand to reveal a terrible gut wound from a bullet that pierced his armor vest. I had seen enough to know it was fatal.

I gave him the closed fist Californian Salute and kept my tears to myself.

Shouts could be heard from the Japanese troops. Some of them were sent in pursuit of Draper, others were looking for the bleeding and dieing that could be hiding amongst the leaves.

"Go!" Muller pushed me with his free arm and returned the salute.

I pushed myself up from the ground, holding my wound just above the shin and started to hobble towards the possible salvation inside a hollowed out log meters away. My hand touched the trunk when I heard the frag grenade explode. The shock wave sent me to the ground with a thud and I was eating dirt in my sleep. Muller must of pulled the pin, held it live in his hand waiting for the Saito soldiers, but let it go when the life left his body, and missed the glory.

They would find me.

"Bloody Mary-Bloody Mary-Bloody Mary."

The chant woke me up in a cold cell, alone, naked, and bleeding from my gunshot wound that had not been treated. My memories after the grenade's shock wave were vague. I think I might have been drugged as my head was spinning and my muscles felt sluggish and hard as stone.

Through the steel bars of a cage meter by a meter wide, I saw a man straddling the lap of another individual, limp in a dentist chair with their back to me. The straddler wore a brown jumpsuit caked with blood and dirt. His eyes focused on the dentist mirror in front of his face. He was a rather lanky Caucasian with brown hair trimmed short military style. Numerous scars with stitch marks lined skin tight across his face, which seemed agonizing to negotiate with when he talked. The man gritted his teeth between words as he angled his hands around the limp man's stomach. I kept my eyes thin, hoping he still thought I was asleep.

"Bloody Mary-Bloody Mary-Bloody Mary," He chanted again and with a thrust he pushed his hands into the limp man on the chair, his eyes never leaving the mirror. "Come to me, Bloody Mary. I know you're awake."

Blood poured down the limp man's waist and splattered like globs of grease on the grime infested yellow tiled floor between the straddler's grunts and squirms. He was pulling something out.

"Bloody Mary look at me!" He pulled a small ball of collected organs out from the limp man's stomach and held it over his head.

My eyes shot open on instinct and he trembled with an intense body sigh. He leaned on the chair, his chest on top the limp man's face. He took a deep breath and looked at me. "You are summoned."

Bloody Mary was a name General Saito's men gave to me. This was my third tour in recon with the California Free State Army and over that time I had developed a reputation of intense aggravation with the Japs. I think Blood Mary came from the numerous times that some wannabe samurai foot soldier would charge me with a katana and I would send him back with a broken bloody nose. I enjoyed returning them in disgrace much more than killing them, but I did enjoy killing them every fucking chance I got.

The man raised the organ up for me to see. "He never had his appendix removed," He poked it with a bloody latex hand. "If this was to ever burst inside of him, it could have been fatal."

"You took good care of that."

He looked at me as if the sky started raining candy. "Indeed I did, Bloody Mary. Was your appendix ever removed?"

"Yes." I wasn't lying. It was taken out when I was fifteen.

He got up from the on top the body in the chair and slowly walked towards my cell.

"Caress this one then if you find yourself longing for days when you still had it," He placed his hand on the cell door and dropped the appendix on my leg along with the other bits still attached, begging for warm blood. He turned his back to me. "Do you know who I am?"

I glared at that bleeding organ pulsating on my wounded leg, but I had to keep my wits. "If I'm Bloody Mary, you must be Queen Elizabeth."

Queen Elizabeth let out a guffaw and spun around banging his hands against the steel cage. "I like you Bloody Mary. You certainly are California Sargent material, they're so hard and steely eyed-pissed that Californians squeal like live pigs on the spit when Saito's men have they're way with them." He made a mocking stern face.

I took a deep breath, but held my composure.

"No retort? I see we're making progress." Queen Elizabeth pushed himself off the cage leaving greasy stains of blood on the steel. Elizabeth turned the dentist chair around for me to see his victim. It was Private Harper, still in his camouflage, tongue unwound out of his mouth like a red carpet, a frozen pleading expression, and a cavernous bloody hole in his stomach.

"What were you doing by Golden Gate Bridge?" Elizabeth asked, his hand resting on the top of Harper's head.

"I decided to take a vacation. Shame the locals weren't friendly."

Elizabeth laughed. "Ol'Harper here said 'We were tossing up drones into the sky to spy on you.' Poor fella. He died painfully squealing for mother to save him because I didn't believe it. However, if you can verify what he told me I'll be more lenient with you."

I imagined Queen Elizabeth's red skinless and throbbing testicles skewered on rusty nails and his futile wails bringing a smile to my face.

"I'll give you some time to consider it." He smiled at me before he whisked himself through the solid steel door on the far side of the room. The lights went out. I flung the appendix off my leg, leaned back on the cold steel cage and stared at the ceiling.

My father and mother both were in the military and they always bragged about the purpose it gave their lives as if I was supposed to inherit it. At fourteen, my father disappeared on patrol on the northern California border close to where we lived. I ran away from home at seventeen into the forest desperate to find him. What I found were cops who forced reality into me.

Decades of racism had passed with countless thousands dying because orks had tusks and pointy ears. I grew up in rural California and I was no stranger to the fear, even though I had the dark complexion of my mother and many say her looks, I was still an ork like my father. I still had tusks and it didn't matter if I had a heart or a soul. I was different.

That's why those cops raped me. I fled to LA under-aged, broke, and desperate. A man by the name of Ryan Hanson had seen a profile of me online and told me that he needed ork models and would pay cash up front for any modeling I would do. He said I was a shoe in and I was desperate.

Months of 'modeling' landed me in movies such as _Orks Who Crave Human Cocks_ 1 through 4 and others with same gist. The name on my fake ID claimed I was twenty when I first started. My name was Tricia Samples. My porn name was Bunny Long. Bunny did it all from double penetration to bondage and Ryan loved it. For a time I was a hot commodity for humans to get their rocks off.

Ryan was my only friend at the time and my usual director. He knew how to shoot me and knew what could be done to me to get me to smile. Ryan claimed I was his best girl and when he needed a fuck, I would oblige with a grin and a few lines of cocain. He told me I was special.

I told him about my father missing in the woods and that I had run off to find him. Ryan wanted the details about how the cops took advantage of a helpless seventeen year old girl on a back country road. We drank a bottle of wine and Ryan held me crying in his arms.

A week later Ryan offered me a job that would pay me a few thousand for a day's work. The set was a police car on the side of a back road. Waiting for me was a small film crew and two blonde blue eyed porn studs dressed as California Free State Patrol. All that was left to make it look like the actual rape scene was a gun in my face and the smell of stale aftershave.

"You're fucking joking, right?" I said to Ryan who already had the cameras set up.

"Hey sugar." Ryan said as fanned his sweaty soaked through vintage Metallica t-shirt on his chest. "One day's work and you get five fucking grand."

I noticed the studs straightening lengths of rope. One smiled and waved at me. "This isn't right. I can't do this," I said.

"Look, I told my producers your story and they were excited. I know it may be kinda strange, but the pay is right. You've done similar stuff before."

"That night I told you what happened was between us, not your producers."

Ryan raised his hands to try and ward me off. "I'm sorry, you've had a dry spell lately. Younger orks are selling and you need more new intense scenes to keep you working."

"I'm not old, I'm twenty."

"Sorry babe, but technically you're twenty three. Greg and Henrik aren't going to hurt you. Consider it method acting. The producers want a rape scene, but you get the last laugh with a cool five grand in your pocket."

"I want seven."

"Five thousand five hundred, final offer. I can't believe you aren't jumping at this opportunity."

After we worked out how the scene would go, I went to hide in the woods. Greg and Henrik came looking for me reciting the various ways they could smell me. They pulled me out by my hair, dragged me over, and slammed me on the police car. All of this had been rehearsed. After the full body search, oral, and some penetration in the open back seat, Henrik squeezed his hands around my throat and hissed: "Whose your daddy, bitch?" I screamed and flailed at Henrik. My knuckles hit his face, breaking his nose.

"What the fuck, Tricia!" Ryan yelled at me as Henrik fell out of the car and into the street. "What happened?"

"It's too much, this is too real." I jumped out of the patrol car went for my outfit that was ripped up on the road. I tried to put it on, but it was in tatters. "Drive me home, Ryan."

"What? No, we gotta wait for an ambulance. What the fuck were you thinking?"

"Fuck you, Ryan." I went to his car where I kept an extra change of clothes.

Ryan ran after me. "Where the fuck are you going? God-damnit Tricia, you fucked up more than Henrik's nose. This shoot is canceled. You're not getting your money."

"You're a god-damned asshole. What I told you wasn't your fucking fantasy. It was my history," I slipped into a white t-shirt, sobbing.

"History, huh? You're the one who's fucking history. This movie is costing me a fortune and I can't have bitches who punch my actors. That's fucking insane."

I came back home an emotional wreck, I couldn't hold a job, and my mother threatened to throw me out. The "purpose" my father claimed was given to his life when he joined the military began to make sense. No future was materializing back home so I decided to sign up at the one place that might control my uncontainable frustration and give me focus, the army. Basic was a breeze and I excelled at infantry training. I felt useful. I even went into the boxing ring on base so I could learn to bust more noses with efficiency. Next time wouldn't be an accident. My drill Sergeants took pride in putting me up for accommodations. They said I had the steel balls of a rabid Rottweiler. My commanding officers placed me in Extreme Recon, some would call it a guerrilla unit. It didn't take me long to get promoted, surviving helped those odds. My real name is Tara Killian-Blackwell. My men call me Sargent Nive. My enemies call me Bloody Mary.

I counted that three hours, five minutes, and thirty seconds had passed before the lights came on again. The door didn't open. Another forty two minutes passed when it did. Four men in Saito uniforms walked in. Two with assault rifles, the others with shackles. They wore dust gray uniforms with the sleeves ripped off exposing rather juiced up tan muscular arms. White linen bags with ripped out holes for eyes and mouth hid their faces. I doubt they were actual foot soldiers as none of them had the measured composure of Saito's troops. Probably mercenaries.

They shackled me at gun point, forced me to crawl across the room. My gunshot wound was no longer bleeding out and the blood crested a thick line down my leg. Harper's expression was still frozen and pleading with me to save him even though he was gone like his appendix.

"I'll kill them, Harper." I promised through the agony of my wounds.

A long humiliating shackled crawl through cold grimy yellow tiled hallway led me to a small interrogation room lit by the usual single light dangling from the ceiling you find in rooms where answers are demanded. They pulled me up and pushed me down on a cold metal chair and began to systematically beat me with leather gloved fists. One solid punch from the first and the next would line up.

I egged them on. "You kiss your mother with that hand?" Their arms felt like freighters.

Queen Elizabeth came in and the bruisers backed off. He slid his finger across a stream of my blood and brought it up to his face. "Elizabeth regretted killing her sister Mary. Did you know that?"

I eyed one of the assault rifles in the corner longingly.

"Elizabeth didn't do it personally, the coward. She should have, but that's the privilege of being a monarch. You only get your hands bloody when you chose to," He licked his finger.

My eyes shot towards him. "Or when the peasants decide to chop off your head."

"How have my peasants been treating you?"

I smiled. The beating awoke my muscles from their drugged induced complacency. "Like royalty, sister."

A distant explosion echoed, rattling dirt from the ceiling. I couldn't tell if that was our artillery or Saitos', but I could see a nervous tick behind his eyes. He wasn't seasoned like me.

"Are you under a deadline, my Queen?" I asked. "Are you needing something valuable from me to tell your superiors before the barbarians invade?"

He turned from me. I hoped it was shame.

"Your psychotic shtick is overplayed," I said. "Not good on someone who isn't afraid to die. Did the Japs teach you how to rip out the appendix or were you once a doctor?"

Elizabeth turned back around. His face cool and looser. "You're right. There is a deadline and if I don't meet it, they skip my bonus pay. I'll be out a couple thousand and you'll be dead after the gauntlet of pain I put you through. I have my complete discretion as per my contract. I like you Mary. It'd be a shame if this had to get even bloodier,"

"Then let me go."

He smirked. "There's a bomb CFS code named 'Blockbuster.' We know it has already been planted."

"Poor Saito."

"All you have to do is tell me where it is."

"No." I hadn't even heard of Blockbuster.

"I said there would be dire consequences, remember?"

"It's easy to completely forget what you say."

Elizabeth frowned and turned to his bruisers. "Do whatever you want. Make her talk and do it quick."

"You still have a lot to learn about being Queen," I said.

Elizabeth closed the door behind him. The bruisers hissed a growl.

There isn't much you can do when four men want to rape you. You keep your legs closed and your mouth shut no matter how many kicks and punches they give you, but you'll give. There is one hole you can't cover very well. After a while I pretended to enjoy it. They were amateurs. Their guard slipped and one of my chains came lose so I could use a hand. I couldn't hope for a better opportunity when they circled jerked their demons on me and I went for that assault rifle. It was a struggle, but I was slippery with blood and juices and their energy had just left them. I let the whole clip tare them apart, ripping off arms and legs with full automatic fire as they were dead on the floor. I couldn't hear with my ears ringing.

Using the other assault rifle, I shot my chains apart and the door knob off. I limped out into the hall, my feet tracking the blood of rapists to be greeted by Queen Elizabeth with a shotgun. It tore a hole into the wall of the interrogation room with a silent thundering roar. I didn't bat an eye as my ears screamed and aimed the assault rifle at his balls and fired. The Queen fell to the floor. Visibly groaning in pain he popped the breach on the shotgun and pulled two shells from his pocket, but he fumbled the shells across the hall. I was on him.

My hands squeezed his throat. I could see him gasping and could feel his vocal cords grunting. He squirmed under me as I my hands tightened. My knees bore into his stomach as I raised myself from him so I could see the life leave. Elizabeth died quicker than I hoped. No longer could I cause him pain.

Cold, naked, and ripped apart I left what turned out to be a cellar of an empty shit brown country house. The freezing wind of a March morning across my back pushed me along. The numbness it caused helped me to ignore most of the pain and it was what I needed wake me through the underbrush. My memory of the walk was a staggering blur.

My squad's fallback position was small ditch in the hills. The sun was past noon when I arrived. Private Draper was asleep in the rocks. He awoke when I let out an exhausted sigh and he went for his machine gun, but stopped when he realized it was me.

"Sargent, what happened?"

"They tried to break me." I remember being amazed that I could hear him; the gun shots of the torture den didn't leave me deaf for long.

"I thought you were dead."

"I'm very much alive." I collapsed to the dirt.


End file.
